Like my friend Esther’s father Jamie, I am a Charles Dickens fan because of the novelist’s exquisite use of the English language. I recently realized that I should also read Dickens to understand today’s Turkey.

Here is the intro. to my latest Hurriyet Daily News (HDN) column. The title, which summarizes the column well, should dispel any sense of mysterious aura:)… Anyway, you can read the whole thing at the HDN website.

For a change, I don’t have anything to add- except that some of the papers/research notes I mentioned, including the main one I discuss, were in Turkish, and so I could not link to them: But if you can speak, or rather read, Turkish, you can have a look at them at Betam’s website…